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Annual pass renewal farce

R

RedBall

TS Member
I'm currently a Merlin annual pass holder (standard). Expiring in April 19. However, a leaflet arrived in my post box early August showing offers available if I renew early. Although it was 8 months early at the time, I thought I'd take it up, upgrade to premium and renew at the same time.

So I pay my £520 for the four of us and book a hotel for a visit to legoland in September after my youngest has had her first couple of weeks at "big school".

So, fast forward a month and here I am at legoland and go to the desk to collect the passes.

Only to be told if I collect them today, the 12 months will start today, meaning I forfeit the remaining 7 months on my existing passes!

As I only have six months to collect the passes (5 now) even if I collect them at the end of that period I'm going to lose 2 months on my current passes.

I queried this with the park duty manager here who agreed and at best the marketing is "misleading". They can only print passes with 12 months validity from the day they print them.

Even now you can find adverts on Merlins site stating "renew any time during your 12 months" and notes to say the passes must be collected within 6 months, but nowhere does it say your new pass overwrites any remaining time on your current pass.

So, and result I've had to get a refund of the £520. I did get the promise they would honour the price for me at the end of my current passes, but in all honesty given this farce I'm wondering whether I may just put that money toward a Disneyworld trip instead.

Anyone else had experience of this? It just seems bizarre, and the marketing people don't appear to have spoken to the people administering the pass printing systems.
 
I don’t know how things work these days but it was always an issue if you renew early and also upgrade.

If they had issued your new passes now then you would have technically been upgraded to premium for longer than the 12 months you paid for. If you had renewed to standard passes again they should have been able to issue the passes and just extend the expiry date.
 
Nope, I was told that they can't print any pass with an expiry date more than 12 months ahead of the date they print them.

I wasn't expecting a bonus on my existing pass, but 4 more passes valid for 12 months from the expiry of my current passes.

I could understand the difficulty of both upgrading and extending, if it hadn't been for the fact the marketing was aimed at convincing me to do exactly that. The leaflet was entitled upgrade your membership, with other details about extending. Plus when I visited the website it asked for my current standard pass numbers to purchase the upgrade.
 
The field asking for your existing pass numbers doesn’t do anything in terms of checking your current passes. It’s just there to make people think they check these things. You can just enter 18 zeros and it will go through fine.

I say take this as a sign and do what you suggested, put the money towards visiting other theme parks. Merlin’s customer services (and their theme parks) leave a lot to be desired.
 
Yes the typical "computer says no" answer, even from somebody in the position of park manager was quite disappointing. All I wanted was the 12 months of premier that I paid for to start at the end of my current annual pass.

Instead I'm now likely to spend that elsewhere. Brilliant sales work and customer service. I'll probably buy a by ch of Lego using the annual pass discount (On stuff that isn't already available elsewhere cheaper) and that will be us done with legoland for the foreseeable future. And all because somebody couldn't overwrite the valid from and to dates on passes we had paid for.

Though I doubt this will ever come to the attention of anyone within merlin who has the authority or indeed the inclination to do anything about it.
 
I've renewed my pass two weeks before it expired, and those two weeks were added to the end. So yes, they can print them with more than 12 months from the current date.
 
I’ve always had existing time added on to passes when renewing, 2 months added on back in July.

Never been a problem over the years I’ve been doing it.
 
Time to email Nick Varney then, his email is online somewhere, he will sort this.

I'm no fan of his but someone on the MAP Facebook group had a similar issue and emailed him, explained what happened and got an email back within three days correcting / contradicting what park management had said.

In our first year we had four months added on because we renewed early too.
 
Thanks for this, I'll email tonight.

However, as I'm here for a second day tomorrow, and it's busier than expected, I'm considering a qbot. Even the ultimate just to maximise our use of the park. We've managed 4 big rides today.

And opinion on the qbots? Is the ultimate worth it over the premium or standard with two children aged 6 and 4 (tall enough for most stuff).
 
When I renewed my pass this year (new year sale rate) I collected them in March and the pass runs to May 2019 so I didn't lose the extra two months.

Got that renewal leaflet myself and was tempted to get it now, glad I didn't now.
 
When I collected my renewal at the end of June (my old one ran out on the 25th of July) they put 1st of August 2019 on my new one.
 
spinba11 said:
When I collected my renewal at the end of June (my old one ran out on the 25th of July) they put 1st of August 2019 on my new one.
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You got someone who knew to add the 7 days on that people who get them posted out get. Should add it to all passes really
 
Yeah you're supposed to get the extra 7 days on all passes, whether collected or posted out. They do have a strange situation where carer passes don't have the extra 7 days added on, it's just a year from the date of issue, so as the girl who served us last year said, "I can either issue you a card now, or you can suddenly discover you've forgotten the paperwork, go home, find it and come back in a weeks time then the carer pass will have the same expiry date as your MAP or gate staff are generally told to let in expired carer passes if the main pass is still valid and it's within that overlap week but you're really taking your life in your hands there as some staff don't even know what park they're at sometimes".

Yeah I'm paraphrasing, but she really did say the last bit about her colleagues.
 
Got a phone call today from somebody after I sent the email. He kindly offered to send out a couple of photo passes for us to use at Alton Towers, but couldnt really offer an explanation as to how the system works the way it does, but did agree that it seems illogical.

Basically you can renew at any time in your 12 month pass period, but you have 6 months to collect and the new pass will be valid for 6 months from the time you collect. Therefore there is absolutely no reason why anyone with more than 6 months left on their current pass should take up the option to renew early.

Legoland have agreed to honour the pries and deal that I wanted to purchase and hold this open for me until a point where I can renew without losing any time on a current pass.

He also agreed on a separate issue that closing a waiting list to buy the VIP pass seemed daft and from a commercial point of view, this weekend hasnt been great between myself and Merlin. Ive had more than £500 refunded, and denied the opportunity of waiting in line to spend a few thousand more at some point in the future.

Oh well, we still came back with a boot full of Lego and smiling kids, which is all I can ask for. The other stuff is just window dressing in life anyway.
 
RedBall said:
you can renew at any time in your 12 month pass period, but you have 6 months to collect and the new pass will be valid for 6 months from the time you collect
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Either you mistyped or this person doesn't understand how passes work either, you have six months to collect the pass and it is then valid for 12 months (+7 days) from the date of collection, it's not valid "for six months from the date of collection".

I don't know what happens if you leave it longer than six months to collect, the longest we left it was a week short of the six months (renewed in February, collected in August) but at a guess I'd say they reduce the length by the time you've gone over.

It also states in the MAP terms and conditions that renewing early can be done and unused time added to the new pass (or it did last time I looked).

There are two MAP sales a year generally, June and January, renewal "discount" is £10 cheaper than renewal outside of the sale, so just renew when needed, you can also renew up to eight weeks after your pass expires and you can just put random numbers in the existing card number field to get past that.
 
IanSR said:
Either you mistyped or this person doesn't understand how passes work either, you have six months to collect the pass and it is then valid for 12 months (+7 days) from the date of collection, it's not valid "for six months from the date of collection".
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Sorry yes, this was a mistype. 12 months validity from the date of collection.

Ive had a couple of calls from Merlin now and one from Mr Varneys office who advises that the feedback has not gone unnoticed, being passed to the relevant directors/managers to look at. They agreed it makes no sense to advise on one hand that you can renew at any time during your 12 months, but then only allow 12 month passes to be printed and collection enforced within 6 months.

They could see how this will lead to people losing months of valisity on their existing pass that they have already paid for. They did however state that I was the first person to ever bring this problem up. I guess somebody has to be first, but Im amazed that given the oversight on timings of the sales with renewal and collection windows I am the first person to experience this.

A an aside there was also no explnation for the closure of the waiting list to purchase VIP though, again agreed that was a bit illogical as its the entire point of a waiting list. I doubt it is often they receive a complaint because a customer wasn't able to spend more money (or join a queue to do so), but there you go.
 
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